Many types of textiles are used in every day life. Simultaneously, the use of electronic equipment in daily life, such as display devices, mobile phones, media players, navigation equipment, and different kinds of sensors increases dramatically.
When electronic equipment is integrated into textiles, new application fields appears, such as textile based display devices, clothes that can tell the present location and point out the direction to a desired location etc.
For ultimate textile integration of electronic components, the interconnecting substrate, e.g. the driving circuitry, should be entirely made of fabrics.
Further, unobtrusive mounting of components onto textile substrates requires the electronic components to be as small as possible and to be widely distributed over the textile substrate in order for the textile to remain its soft and pliable character.
One approach for integrating electrical components into textiles is described in GB 2 396 252 A, describing a textile fabric comprising light-emitting diodes. The textile fabric comprises conductive electrodes, which for example may be woven into the fabric, or printed or embroidered on the fabric. The electrodes and the LEDs together form a matrix-addressable display.
In this patent application, the connectors of the LEDs are attached to the electrodes of the fabric by gluing with an electrically conducting epoxy or by fixing crimp contacts to the electrodes and connecting the LEDs by soldering the LED connectors to the crimp contacts.
However, direct attachment of distributed electronic components, such as LEDs, onto a textile substrate using conductive epoxy is a very delicate and time-consuming process.
Direct soldering of the components onto the textile substrate may often be problematic as well, for example due to the low melting temperature of several textile fibers, such as polyester.
Thus, there is a need in the art for means and methods for arranging electrical components on textile substrates that can be used independent on the nature of the textile fiber, which are well suited for automated arrangement, and which provides a robust attachment of the electronic components on the textile substrate.